Demands of Foreign Assignments : Correspondents Must Mix Curiosity With Isolation

What qualities does a newspaper editor look for in a prospective foreign correspondent?

“We want someone with a sense of intelligent curiosity about other areas of the world,” said Michael Getler, foreign editor of the Washington Post, “someone with a sense of adventure . . . who can . . . break fresh ground . . . with insight into how things are done in other countries . . . someone who can absorb a significant amount of disorder in their lives.”

Editors also agree that the long hours and exhausting travel to which a foreign correspondent is subjected make being young and single a big advantage--and they agree, too, that a reporter working abroad must be able to work and live while cut off from the daily support system of friends, family and office colleagues.

“Most journalists are, by and large, insecure people,” said Charles T. Powers, who just completed six years as the Los Angeles Times correspondent in Nairobi, Kenya. “I have gone through periods where I was on the road and sort of disconnected and where I felt fairly isolated. . . . I like to shmooze (with my editors) from time to time.”

Powers likes to shmooze so much, in fact, that when he was still relatively new overseas, he received a note from his foreign editor saying that Times accountants had come across “a startling contrast” between his predecessor’s telephone bill for the previous year ($2,000) and Powers’ projected phone bill for his first year abroad ($12,000).

Powers attributes part of his higher telephone bill to an increase in telephone rates in Nairobi, but he concedes that he likes to talk to his editors more than some correspondents who “go for weeks at a time” without such contact.

Virtually all foreign correspondents complain about feelings of isolation and insecurity, though; they worry that no communication with the home office means that they have been forgotten or, worse, have fallen from favor.

In an effort to alleviate this problem, editors at the major papers send their foreign correspondents daily telex cables showing where the major foreign stories are being displayed in the next day’s paper. Editors also telephone or telex their correspondents periodically, although the amount of such contact varies considerably, depending on the paper, the correspondent and the urgency of the story he or she is working on at any given time.

On a major, breaking news story, such as the overthrow of Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Philippines, most foreign editors speak with their correspondents several times a day, but in a bureau such as New Delhi, where such stories are infrequent, editors and their correspondents may not speak for weeks at a time.

Communications between correspondents in the field and their offices in the United States have improved considerably in recent years as telephone systems have become more sophisticated and as reporters have begun to use portable computers that connect to telephone lines to file their stories to their home office. Communications problems still exist in some parts of the Third World, but conditions are not nearly as primitive as they were even 15 or 20 years ago.

‘Flabbergasted’ by Change

Fox Butterfield, who worked abroad for the New York Times from the late 1960s until 1981, when he became chief of the paper’s Boston bureau, said he was “flabbergasted” by the improvements he saw in communications when he went to the Philippines for the Times for two months early this year.

“I can think back (to) when you considered yourself lucky to get through at all,” Butterfield said. “When I was in Bangladesh for a month at the end of the war (there) in 1971. . . . for the first two weeks, there was literally no way to file. I would stay up all night trying to get a cable through . . . or a phone call . . . knowing I’d go out and get another story the next day and not be able to do anything about it either.”

Improved communications systems are not necessarily an unqualified benefit.

Faster communication increases the pressure on correspondents abroad to file their stories as quickly as possible--sometimes too quickly, without sufficient time for reporting and reflection, says H. D. S. Greenway, former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post and now associate editor for national and foreign news at the Boston Globe.

This is particularly true, Greenway and others said, of television reporters abroad. The pressure to get the story fast and put it on the satellite for the evening news even faster results in “instant news, with no context,” said Steve Singer, an “ABC Close-Up” producer who has worked on documentaries in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Western Europe.

TV Often Calls Shots

What makes this especially alarming is that television increasingly sets the agenda for foreign news coverage on major stories.

Walter Cronkite’s televised conversations with then-leaders Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt led directly to Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977, and television coverage of the Philippine election campaign this year helped undermine the American support that had long been instrumental in keeping Marcos in power. Television also provides the most dramatic coverage of terrorist bombings and hostage takings--and sometimes becomes an actual part of those stories.

But foreign correspondents usually worry more about communication from their editors than they do about competition from television, and improved communications systems means more (often unwanted) communication with their editors. There is a dichotomy here, of course. Just as too little communication with the home office leads to insecurity, too much communication undercuts the freedom that correspondents say is the single greatest benefit of their job.

Journalism has improved considerably since the day when the editor of the (now defunct) Chicago Times ordered one of his reporters, “Telegram fully all news you can get and when there is no news send rumors,” but foreign correspondents still grumble about what they see as ignorant and/or unreasonable demands from their editors back home.

Talk of the ‘Rocket’

In fact, wherever longtime foreign correspondents gather, one of their favorite topics of conversation is the “rocket”--the urgent cable from an editor, demanding a particular piece of information or a particular story to match a competitor’s story--and correspondents enjoy trying to top each other with tales of their editors’ strangest rockets.

A sure winner in any such discussion: The cable Edward Behr received when he worked in Paris for Time magazine in 1956 and filed a story on the death of Mistinguet, a famous French cabaret singer who had died of old age. His editor’s cable:

“Our information is that she had no pubic hair. Please check soonest and advise.”

When not responding to rockets, foreign correspondents revel in their freedom to report and write their stories as they see fit. A correspondent on the scene is generally thought to know more about a given situation than do his editors back home, so he is permitted more latitude than a domestic reporter usually would be given in interpreting events.

Reporters abroad often rely heavily on the observations of their colleagues--and on their own analyses--without necessarily telling their editors or their readers that’s what they are doing.

Use of Euphemisms

Mort Rosenblum, longtime foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, wrote in his book “Coups and Earthquakes” that such phrases as “observers said” and “it is generally accepted” often mean that the correspondent is “giving his own view but must defer to (journalistic) custom by adding some attribution. ‘Observer’ in this sense is normally a synonym for the reporter himself or at least the one at the next typewriter.”

Foreign correspondents also tend to rely too heavily on sources in the American embassy--and on cab drivers and hotel employees--wherever they are assigned.

Andrew Nagorski of Newsweek wrote in “Reluctant Farewell” about listening to “an anti-Polish diatribe” by a cabbie driving him and another correspondent in Moscow shortly after authorities cracked down on Solidarity in Poland. Nagorski said the other correspondent then wrote a story “characterizing the attitudes of the average Soviet citizen toward Poland based on that single conversation.”

Sourcing is but one difference between foreign and domestic reporting. Another, Rosenblum said, is that foreign correspondents, trying to persuade their editors and their readers of the importance of events in distant lands, may be “tempted to reach for dramatic conclusions or wide generalizations to make their stories more attractive. . . . “

Thus, the structure of a typical foreign story might best be described as summarize, generalize, analyze, theorize.

‘Hunches and Guesses’

“You work on hunches and guesses,” said Richard Eder, former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and now book critic for the Los Angeles Times.

Other foreign correspondents call their trade “seat of the pants reporting”--in large part because the presumed expertise of the foreign correspondent is often a sham or, at best, more a matter of reportorial instinct than of acquired intelligence; language and cultural barriers generally render a foreign correspondent far less knowledgeable about his assignment abroad than he would be on a similar story in the United States. Moreover, a foreign correspondent often has to cover so much territory and so many subjects that he cannot possibly be well informed on many (if any) of them.

Some new foreign correspondents find this new freedom-cum-responsibility discomfiting.

Powers of the Los Angeles Times said that the most difficult part of becoming a foreign correspondent was “getting the confidence to go into a country where I’d never been before and developing the sense that I could make judgments . . . without being a Harvard Ph.D.”

That problem--and the freedom that breeds it--are typical of the dichotomized state of the foreign correspondent’s life; each benefit of foreign correspondence seems to carry with it a concomitant burden.

Basic Experience

In no aspect of a foreign correspondent’s life is this more true than in the basic experience of living in a foreign culture. This may be especially troublesome on a correspondent’s first assignment, and editors selecting new correspondents must ask themselves: Will the correspondent look on cultural differences and logistical problems abroad as a delightful adventure or as an onerous burden?

Many otherwise talented journalists flop as foreign correspondents precisely because they spend most of their time complaining about primitive communications systems, delayed airplane flights and people whose sense of time, social relationships and a free press are radically different from their own, rather than trying to understand and write about what makes the country and its people what they are.

“You have to be the sort of person who doesn’t look upon it as a cultural adjustment but as an intriguing cultural difference,” said R. W. Apple, who was in Saigon, Nairobi, Moscow and London for the New York Times and is now the paper’s chief Washington correspondent.

“My wife, to whom I’ve only been married for a while, asked me one night, ‘When did you become interested in flowers and animals?’ ” Apple said, “and I said, ‘When I was living in Nairobi.’ ” All his life, Apple said, he has “liked books and music and pictures,” but he found little of that in Nairobi.

What he did find there was “splendid outdoors--extraordinary animals and wonderful flowers--so I got interested in animals and flowers.”

Cultural Adaptation

The ability to adapt to a foreign culture, to avoid the “easy (temptation) to impose your own culture on a foreign culture . . . to say, ‘Boy, is this place screwed up’ because they don’t do it like we do,” in the words of David Lamb of the Los Angeles Times, was the most frequently mentioned characteristic of the successful correspondent in recent interviews with correspondents, past and present.

“In Cairo, your first week there, when you walk into the kitchen and your cook is praying . . . on a mat when you’re starting to mix a drink, you don’t know how to react. Do you leave? Do you mix your drink? Do you get down there and pray with him?” Lamb asked.

But how is an editor to judge who can adjust to life in Cairo or New Delhi or Moscow--or even Paris or London--based on reportorial performance in city hall or in the county courthouse?

“I don’t really know how you can tell in advance for sure,” said Craig Whitney, former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and now that paper’s assistant managing editor.

“We pick people we think are the best writers we have, the best reporters we have . . . and 40% of the time--crash,” Whitney said. “What did we fail to see in the ones that crashed? Damned if I know sometimes.”

Once in a Lifetime

Warren Hoge, foreign editor of the New York Times, said he warns all foreign correspondents leaving on their first assignments abroad that they are about to embark on the most different and difficult experience of their lives.

“When I went abroad in 1979 (to Rio de Janeiro) . . . the first six months were six of the most desperate months I’ve ever spent in my entire life,” Hoge said. “You just feel like you’ve thrown your whole career away.”

And what happens when a foreign correspondent--especially a longtime foreign correspondent--returns home to resume working in the United States? Many correspondents (and their editors) say that readjustment can be even more difficult than the adjustment to living and working abroad. The readjustment is part intellectual/psychological/political, part financial and part professional.

Apple said being a foreign correspondent “changes one’s intellectual caste,” makes one both questioning and more understanding. Lamb said his experience abroad made him “a whole different person. . . . “

‘Really Small Potatoes’

“Living in the Third World has made me understand . . . that however huge my problems of the day may seem, they’re really small potatoes compared to what the vast majority out there are suffering,” Lamb said. “I think it made me far more compassionate toward my fellow man and . . . far more appreciative of my own country.”

Lamb said his experience in Africa and the Mideast also made him more liberal politically.

“I still would fall on the Republican side of the fence,” he said, but he is now “far more skeptical . . . of the anti-Communist line that comes out of Washington. I realize how totally irrelevant that is to most of the problems in Africa, Latin America and certainly the Arab world.”

Most of Lamb’s comments were echoed by other foreign correspondents in interviews for these stories. Although some said they had been made more conservative, rather than more liberal, by their experience abroad, virtually all said that the experience had made them more skeptical of government in general--more likely to agree with I. F. Stone’s observation: “Every government is run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed.”

Correspondents who left the United States in the activist 1960s and return in the Reagan 1980s may find their financial readjustment even more jarring than their political readjustment.

Generally Well Paid

Foreign correspondents are generally among the best paid of all newspaper reporters, and since the first $85,000 earned overseas by an American citizen is not taxed by the United States--and very few foreign correspondents earn more than that--most live virtually tax free (except in high-tax countries such as England).

Foreign correspondents also tend to live in very nice houses abroad--except in Peking, Moscow and perhaps one or two other places. Moreover, newspapers generally pay most (or all) their correspondents’ rent and most (or all) their children’s pre-college education costs. Papers also pay for periodic trips home and--in some cases--provide a car and driver, as well as secretarial and other professional services, whether the reporter has a separate office or, as is sometimes the case, an office in his home.

Those correspondents who travel a great deal live largely on an expense account and can bank most (or all) of their salaries--especially if they live in Third World countries where there is little they want to buy anyway. Cooperative concierges in some hotels help the correspondents further by “laundering” their hotel bills; in exchange for a small bribe, the concierge will change a correspondent’s bill so that expenses his paper will not pay (bar bills) appear on the bill as expenses his paper will pay (telex or telephone charges).

Being a foreign correspondent was a financial bonanza in the 1960s and 1970s, said Greenway of the Boston Globe. In those days, a foreign correspondent could “live like a king,” deal in the local currency black market and come home with a substantial nest egg.

Still Do Quite Well

Such windfalls are no longer possible, Greenway said, but correspondents in most countries still do quite well.

Robert J. Rosenthal of the Philadelphia Inquirer said that when he was in Nairobi from 1982 until March of this year, he saved about $90,000 that he would not have saved had he been working in the United States. Other foreign correspondents say they have had similar (or greater) savings.

When these correspondents return to the United States, their standard of living often drops dramatically--especially if they have been abroad for a long time and want to buy a house in today’s inflationary market.

John Vinocur spent 17 years in Europe for the New York Times, for example, and when he returned last year to New York--where he is now the paper’s metropolitan editor--he found that he could not afford to buy a house in the kind of neighborhood he wanted.

“If you live abroad for 20 years . . . in apartments, no matter how nice, you end up with memories, no real estate,” said Charles P. Wallace, the Los Angeles Times correspondent in Amman, Jordan. “If you lived in L.A. all that time, you’d have a house that appreciated in value . . . the primary asset most people have.”

The career foreign correspondent--the reporter who stays abroad for 20 years or more--may be a dying breed, however.

Need for Fresh Eye

Just as editors think it is better to move a reporter out of a country after three or four years, to bring in a fresh eye, so some editors think a correspondent should come back to the United States periodically to reacquaint himself with his country and his colleagues.

The Los Angeles Times has five correspondents who have been abroad more or less continuously for more than 20 years--and one, Don Cook in Paris, who has been abroad for 43 years. Henry Kamm of the New York Times has been abroad for 26 years, Jonathan Randall of the Washington Post for 30 years, Loren Jenkins of the Post for 20 years, Raymond Mosley of the Chicago Tribune for 25 years.

Editors at the New York Times and Los Angeles Times say they decide on a case-by-case basis how long a reporter should stay abroad.

“If a reporter is doing a terribly good job, I have no problem with his staying abroad indefinitely,” said A. M. Rosenthal, executive editor of the New York Times. “Some of our permanent correspondents are among the best we have.”

But some editors worry that career foreign correspondents lose their perspective and become increasingly isolated from their papers and from the concerns of their readers in the United States. That is why Michael Getler, foreign editor of the Washington Post, said correspondents should generally come back to this country for a while after three consecutive foreign assignments.

Get Vacation, Leave

Even though most correspondents return to the States for vacations and/or for “home leave” after each tour of duty, some editors do not think this is sufficient.

Apple of the New York Times says that when he returned to his paper’s Washington bureau early this year, he found the changes that had taken place here in the 15 years he had spent abroad “totally stunning,” even though he had come home annually to visit and had spent five weeks in 1983 traveling around the country, writing about the mood of America.

Still, Apple did not want to leave London for Washington, and he cannot wait to go abroad again.

Some foreign correspondents who feel as Apple does about remaining abroad do just that; if their editors want them to come home, they go to work for someone else who will let them stay abroad.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has the most rigid policy on returning home--a one-tour maximum, then back to the States.

Wouldn’t Be Fair

Gene Roberts, executive editor of the Inquirer, said that in addition to being concerned about the isolation of career foreign correspondents, “It would not . . . (be) fair to the total staff to . . . be frozen out for years” while a few reporters rotate among the paper’s half-dozen foreign bureaus.

Thus, David Zucchino, who spent almost two years in Beirut for the Inquirer, returned to Philadelphia for 18 months before being sent to Nairobi early this year.

Some foreign correspondents are able to satisfy both their editors’ desires to have them in the United States and their own preference for traveling abroad by getting occasional overseas assignments while based in the United States. Other correspondents do not mind alternating between foreign and domestic assignments, if the domestic assignments are interesting enough. Joseph Lelyveld of the New York Times has been back and forth several times, in a variety of challenging jobs both at home and abroad, and is now chief of the paper’s London bureau. Still other foreign correspondents, such as David Ottaway of the Washington Post, are given assignments in Washington, covering the diplomatic and national security beat, where they can maintain contact with foreign sources and foreign issues.

But there are a limited number of such jobs, and a reporter accustomed to working independently, covering an entire country, is often frustrated and bored when confronted with a more mundane domestic assignment--and with editors who are in almost constant contact with him.

‘Very Hard Time’

Zucchino, for example, said that when he returned to Philadelphia, he “had a very hard time . . . being tied to a desk and going into an office every day and . . . having someone else decide each day what I was going to do. . . . I never felt like my life was my own again. . . . I was . . . back to where I first started in my first (newspaper) job,” doing routine, daily journalism.

Now, Zucchino said, he is “dreading” having to decide whether to go back to Philadelphia again when his Nairobi tour is over--or whether he should seek work abroad with another publication, as Mark Fineman of the Inquirer did when confronted with a similar decision; rather than return to Philadelphia for the Inquirer, Fineman went to Manila for the Los Angeles Times.

In an effort to avoid both the attrition and frustration of correspondents ordered home and the calcification of correspondents left abroad too long, James D. Squires, editor of the Chicago Tribune, has instituted a two-tier system of foreign correspondents--”a cadre of what amounts to permanently based . . . experienced, older . . . career foreign correspondents” and a second, much larger group of younger correspondents who work only one or two tours abroad, then return home (and, in some cases, go abroad again later).

Squires said he understands and appreciates “the value of youth, of vigor, of fresh ideas,” but he also believes strongly that “some parts of the world, particularly the Far East and the Middle East, are so different from American culture that running new people through there, while it has some advantages, you really spend a lot of time spinning your wheels and preparing people to go and they spend a lot of time . . . figuring out . . . what these people are about, and when they get that done, they leave, and we send a new person and start it all over again.”

Besides, Squires said, “There’s no place to put . . . an ex-London bureau chief” in Chicago.

Susanna Shuster of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for these articles.